Photo: Harrison McClary
Audiences will get to watch two master instrumentalists do something rare on March 1: strip music down to a bare, exposed conversation and take the risk of discovery in public. Edgar Meyer, whose career has leapt seamlessly between bluegrass fields and roots music collaborations to the world’s most prestigious classical halls, will appear in duo with celebrated saxophonist Chris Potter for the first time, a pairing Meyer admits is unusual enough that “on paper it’s not a good match.” Which is exactly why it matters.
Meyer speaks about Potter, a Grammy-winning musician and composer, the way a collector talks about a single, impossible find: with plain admiration and an almost scientific curiosity. “I’ve been a big fan for a long time,” he says. “He has an incredibly beautiful voice on the instrument, and almost every time I hear him play I hear something I didn’t expect, something that delights me or moves me. Honestly, I just wanted to stand next to that and see what it looked like up close.”
Honored with a truly staggering list of awards and accolades, including seven Grammy awards, Meyer remains fascinated with the notion of standing next to a sound. To create the vehicle for a conversation when no vehicle exists.
The Potter pairing grows directly from that impulse. The union of double bass and tenor sax is one of extremes: the bass occupies a cello-like space but with low, foundational weight; the tenor sax carves out a similar midrange. Together, they leave no harmonic padding. “It’s a pretty Spartan texture,” Meyer admits. “There’s a challenge to it… It’s a thing that has to be figured out for the music to work.”
The two met in Manhattan on February 6 for a rehearsal, running through four of Meyer’s compositions along with two newly written pieces by Potter. Meyer also has at least one new piece slated for the program, which will be composed primarily—if not entirely—of original works. These pieces will include some tightly structured compositions and some looser forms with more improvising.
Meyer is often described as a hybrid musician, equally at home in classical, bluegrass, and world music settings. But he doesn’t see his career as a collection of styles. “It’s all music,” he says. “Most of it uses the same 12 notes. Rhythm is what it is… the majority of what’s called different genres tends to be more like different dialects.”
That mindset has been a guiding theme throughout his career. Not one of his major partnerships, he notes, began as a business arrangement. They grew out of shared rooms, mutual friends, and genuine musical curiosity. He and Potter share a powerful common thread in the late tabla master Zakir Hussain, whose cross-cultural projects brought together artists from vastly different traditions. “It’s a very powerful thing to have spent any time with Zakir,” Meyer reflects. That shared orbit deepens the conversation that will unfold March 1.
Meyer’s instinct to build musical channels has also shaped his compositional life. In his mid-20s, he wrote a series of string trios that he now considers a turning point; works that marked what he describes as his passage into adulthood. After being inspired by performers at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, he came to a realization: “If I wanted to play with people like that, there was nothing to play,” he recalls. “So, I needed to be a creator in order to connect with all of these wonderful musicians.”
Those early trios, composed in the mid-1980s, have remained central to him for decades and now Meyer has returned to these seminal works, along with a brand new trio composition, recording them for an upcoming album release. Joined by violinist Tessa Lark and cellist Joshua Roman at the Blair School of Music, the sessions were anything but casual. The music itself is demanding with eleven movements across multiple works, some of it rhythmically intricate, some physically taxing, and at least one movement Meyer describes as the most intense of the entire project. There is little improvisation. These are fully written pieces, tightly constructed, with emotional arcs that unfold over extended spans.
What struck observers during the Blair sessions was the combination of intensity and trust. Meyer had carefully chosen Lark and Roman not simply for their virtuosity, though both are exceptional classical string players, but because of their broader musical instincts. They are, like Meyer, creators in their own right; musicians who grew up in a musical world far more malleable than the one that shaped his early years. “You end up with a trio that didn’t exist 40 years ago,” he says. Players rooted in classical rigor but fluent in a wider musical language.
For Meyer, the project was more than a recording. It was a true “life circle” moment. Those trios were written during a formative period of his life; to document them now, in the building that has become synonymous with family and home, carried weight. He describes the sessions as being “focused and satisfying… one of the moments in my life. I’m not going to have another full-circle moment like that.”
Deepening the intimate nature of the recordings, long-time friend and frequent collaborator Béla Fleck came on board as producer, offering a trusted and intuitive ear. “I share a long history with Béla, and I trust him to understand how the music should feel and how it should sound.”
The result is not nostalgia. It is continuation. A reaffirmation that the creative decision he made at 25 still guides him 40 years later. The same instinct that led him to write trios when none existed now leads him to explore new duos, new concertos, new combinations. The vehicles keep evolving.
If March 1 marks a moment of artistic risk, it also arrives during a season of transition, as Meyer’s Artist in Residence tenure with the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music is drawing to a close.
Blair has never been merely a workplace. It is where his wife, violinist Cornelia “Connie” Heard, serves as the Valere Blair Potter Professor of Violin, chair of the string department, and a member of the Blair String Quartet. She is the daughter of the late Alexander Heard, Vanderbilt’s fifth chancellor, who guided the university through the 1960s and 1970s and helped introduce Blair as Vanderbilt’s tenth school.
For Meyer, the history is personal. He has watched his wife build her distinguished career there, teaching countless young violinists who have gone on to major accomplishments. Their son also grew up within its walls, studying and absorbing the musical life around him. “I feel like I’ve been in the school my whole life,” Meyer says. “It feels like home.”
To step away from such a place is not simple. But like many of Meyer’s artistic decisions, it reflects an understanding that just as seasons change, music continues forward.
On March 1, that forward motion will be visible and audible. Two players, each masters of craft and invention, will enter a room with little between them and the audience. “The easiest part,” Meyer says, “is I know that everything that comes out of Chris’s horn is going to be amazing. It’ll be fun to listen to even if we don’t figure it out.”
The promise of artists probing the uncertain edge of a sound is the real draw. For Meyer, Potter, and the listener, the evening will be less about arriving at a polished roadmap and more about discovering, in real time, what happens when two generational talents unite for the first time.
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Edgar Meyer and Chris Potter will perform Sunday, March 1, 2026, 7:30 p.m. in Ingram Hall at the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music.
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